You call. The assistant says: “Mr. Müller left the firm last year.”
No big deal, you cross off the contact, move on, but how many contacts like this are still sitting quietly in your list while you’re putting them down as disinterested?
Allocation heads change every two to three years.
CEOs, portfolio managers, distribution leads, the people you need to place a fund, are mobile. Your list is not.
Most fund managers maintain their contact base reactively. Email bounces, gets updated. Someone says on a call “he’s gone”, gets updated. But what about the contacts who simply don’t respond? The ones written off as “no interest”, even though the person left six months ago and only the email was never updated?
Looks like a weak pipeline. It’s contact ghosts.
What an outdated investor list really costs
Not just the minutes of the call, the momentum. You prepared, thought through the right opening, pulled the materials, and then the wrong person, with the wrong remit, at the wrong time picks up.
Three calls like that in a row and you start asking whether this might be a product problem rather than a people problem, not whether the list is right.
The damage is this: you can no longer tell whether someone is genuinely not interested or simply long gone.
What helps against contact ghosts
Take your top 50 contacts. For everyone you haven’t had real contact with in more than 6 months, do a quick LinkedIn check to see whether the person is still at the company. That takes 30 seconds per contact and shows you immediately how many contact ghosts you have and where it makes sense to reconnect.
The list needs to be right before the next call, not after.
Ideally with a source that does this continuously, not as a one-off project.
Anyone who wants to solve this internally needs time and capacity. Both are chronically scarce in fund distribution teams. Most teams know the problem and still put it off, because there’s no immediate deadline.
Until the next call comes with “she hasn’t been with us for a while now.”
Interested in the topic or just want to talk it through? Get in touch directly:
Tobias Rethmeyer · rethmeyer@arcvesta.com